An analysis of language errors in the middle school students' writings

Abstract

This study analyzed the frequency of linguistic errors in middle school students` writing and correlation between frequency of errors and writing result. Previous studies have only introduced the types of errors in college students` writing. However, in order for linguistic error analysis to contribute to the improvement of writing quality, it is necessary to analyze what the errors are frequently. Additionally it will have a long-term educational effect when studied for school-age students. As a result of the analysis of 100 posts of middle school students, the linguistic errors of high frequency in middle school students were 1)inadequate conjunctive clause, 2)omission of essential sentence components, and 3)errors in honorific mood, and they all belong to the syntactic category. Especially, inappropriate sentences related to text and contextual categories need to think about the possibility that student writers have insufficient awareness of written language rules. The error of the syntactic category showed a significant correlation between the writing level and writing amount. The higher the writing level, the more the writing amount tended to increase. This means that the longer the length of the text, the greater the frequency of syntactic errors contained in it. However qualitative differences in linguistic errors between low and high-level students needs to be closely examined through correlations with the types of sentences or t-units generated in subsequent studies.